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PC's in general are dieing. The world is slowly switching to Tablets, phones and smart devices. It will be gradual, but PC companies are being force to adapt or die.

There is a reason wall street money is flooding away from PC and PC sales are declining. MMos are going to adapt and end up being played on tablets. This likely means in depth gameplay will be a thing of the past and give way for the ease of touch screen play.

I do not think MMOs will ever die, they will just turn into crappy "app" style garbage.

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Originally posted by CalmOceans

Most people don't need MMO to interact online, there are plenty of chat opportunities, facebook, twitter, disqus, liveFire, forums, email, messengers, smartphones, youtube. You have all these ways to interact with people you want, there is way too much noise to make a world where people will be truly immersed and willing to spend time with each other in a game outside of gameplay.

There's no need for it anymore, there are thousands of other and arguably better ways to interact online.

OP, excellent post. I think you are pretty spot on.

I just wanted to focus on this one segment where you talk about the introduction of social networking (web 2.0) and the impact it has had on MMOs. This insight is so essential to what separates the old school MMOs from the modern ones, and I think the descent into the current reality occurred directly inversely to the increase in social network technologies/services.

My general view is this, that online gaming was a place of rich relationship in the early days, when the internet was an anonymity wasteland, yet ever since the internet became the primary place through which people socialize the online gaming world has fallen into a place that is disproportionately anonymous and in which relationships are superficial.

Prior to social networking, online interaction was anonymous, and that anonymity was a defining feature of online life. One essentially used the internet to escape life, not to augment it. MMOs, in this context, preserved anonymity as at the heart of social relations, but in turn anchored it by providing hyper-persistent characters around whom your whole identity and reputation was built. Yes, people did not know you in real life, but they knew your character and they formed an opinion about you based on that character. Leveling that character was a long commitment, those were the days when alts were rare and people only played 1 game at a time. Those were the days when people got to know you from the inside out, they saw your innermost personality as represented though your avatar and then only later might draw conclusion about you in real life. Those were the days in which you BECAME your character, and in doing so experienced a very profound sense of immersion that no amount of graphics or story can recreate. You felt connected to other people through your character, and because your character was so persistent and your commitment to him/her so strong, those relationships with other people seemed very real.

With the emergence and expansion of social networking, the heart of social interaction online moved from anonymity, to ego-identity. So everything online became about you, the person in "real life". (Though this person is ultimately just as virtual as your MMO avatars, that is the realm of Buddhism, not ordinary people.) Everything you did online became attached to this "real you" you, and apparently permanently so, fundamentally changing ones relationship to online life. The internet was no longer a way to escape life, just the opposite really, and this basic shift had profound implications for MMOs.

First and foremost was the death of hyper-persistent characters. One or two characters no longer became your online identity, your online identity was always, implicity or explicity, the "real you" you, and that you had no particular attachment to any one or two characters. The industry simultaneously shifted to become more "casual", allowing for quicker leveling and various features to actually encourage you never to stick with any one character for too long. With so many games flooding the market, soon you were playing several different games with multiple characters in each . . . and everyone else was doing the same. Consequently, ingame interaction with other players became increasingly -- and this is the paradox -- anonymous. Before you knew it, everyone was soloing and flooding general chat with anonymous meanspirited garbage. If you managed to become excessively annoying you just logged onto a different character and started fresh. You never formed strong relations with other characters because no one was committed enough to their characters for that relation to last, yet few were particularly inclined to jump to the next level of relationship with random people they met ingame.

Essential to the idea of the MMO is 'persistence', a world that exists whether you log in or not. But by shifting identity away from the online character back to the "real you" the anchor of persistence no longer exists in game, resulting in the mass of behavior in which players find themselves never committed to anything for very long, whether it be a character or a game; or simply find themselves jumping between too many characters and several games all at once. In this modern context, games that rest upon persistence will feel a bit like they have fallen from their glory days.

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Before social media/networking became big, MMOs were a place to have a seperate, virtual identity.

People cared about reputation and community, and the games/systems reflected that.

There was a big difference in online play versus offline.

Now that everything is online, there is no difference between your self and your online self, so things like roleplay and immersion and community are not is important inside the game world.

Since every game is online now to some extent, online RPGs are no longer a world to escape to but simply a time waster/place for fun like everything else on the internet.

Like all things, technology and the "instant access" it gives have sped the world up - life is simply faster and more connected/intertwined electronically.

The games, their systems, and the "average" player's experience reflects that.

When I started playing MMOs, we didn't "surf the internet" we logged on for very specific purposes with our telephone line modems.

There was no online integration of our ilves.

We didn't have chat clients until "always on" DSL / cable came about. We didn't have social networking. Most of our gaming was done offline, and multiplayer generally meant crowding 4+ people around the N64.

MMOs aren't dying. They are evolving.

And as per usual, society (the players) is struggling to keep up with the pace technological change has brought.

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One word... Evolution! As the wheel turns the mmo market grows, develops and tries new things. From a nostalgic point of view its true that the era of school mmos (founders of the genre) is passing but I am sure that in the future games will reflect the old skool games. Look at all those sandbox kickstarter games that are aimed at capturing more classic elements. It ll be fine, we are just getting older and its a bit of a dry patch (there most def games out there to try even if they dont offer the full package TSW/SWTOR/GW2/Tera/Rift are all worth a try).

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Before social media/networking became big, MMOs were a place to have a seperate, virtual identity.

People cared about reputation and community, and the games/systems reflected that.

There was a big difference in online play versus offline.

Now that everything is online, there is no difference between your self and your online self, so things like roleplay and immersion and community are not is important inside the game world.

Since every game is online now to some extent, online RPGs are no longer a world to escape to but simply a time waster/place for fun like everything else on the internet.

Like all things, technology and the "instant access" it gives have sped the world up - life is simply faster and more connected/intertwined electronically.

The games, their systems, and the "average" player's experience reflects that.

When I started playing MMOs, we didn't "surf the internet" we logged on for very specific purposes with our telephone line modems.

There was no online integration of our ilves.

We didn't have chat clients until "always on" DSL / cable came about. We didn't have social networking. Most of our gaming was done offline, and multiplayer generally meant crowding 4+ people around the N64.

MMOs aren't dying. They are evolving.

And as per usual, society (the players) is struggling to keep up with the pace technological change has brought.

MMOs are in flux.

Exactly. You and I are on the same page, and I agree MMOs are evolving.

But as I wrote that I realized something: that experience of immersion, of becoming your avatar, a super-human version of your innermost sense of self, was an extremely powerful experience. And though it has been cast aside in the current era, the power of that experience is not going to go away. It may lie dormant, this generation may not be ready for it, but eventually human beings are going to want this experience, and by the time we are ready for it, technology will be so incredible that this experience of becoming your heroic self will be far more profound than anything we experienced at the dawn of MMOs.

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Before social media/networking became big, MMOs were a place to have a seperate, virtual identity.

People cared about reputation and community, and the games/systems reflected that.

There was a big difference in online play versus offline.

Now that everything is online, there is no difference between your self and your online self, so things like roleplay and immersion and community are not is important inside the game world.

Since every game is online now to some extent, online RPGs are no longer a world to escape to but simply a time waster/place for fun like everything else on the internet.

Like all things, technology and the "instant access" it gives have sped the world up - life is simply faster and more connected/intertwined electronically.

The games, their systems, and the "average" player's experience reflects that.

When I started playing MMOs, we didn't "surf the internet" we logged on for very specific purposes with our telephone line modems.

There was no online integration of our ilves.

We didn't have chat clients until "always on" DSL / cable came about. We didn't have social networking. Most of our gaming was done offline, and multiplayer generally meant crowding 4+ people around the N64.

MMOs aren't dying. They are evolving.

And as per usual, society (the players) is struggling to keep up with the pace technological change has brought.

MMOs are in flux.

Exactly. You and I are on the same page, and I agree MMOs are evolving.

But as I wrote that I realized something: that experience of immersion, of becoming your avatar, a super-human version of your innermost sense of self, was an extremely powerful experience. And though it has been cast aside in the current era, the power of that experience is not going to go away. It may lie dormant, this generation may not be ready for it, but eventually human beings are going to want this experience, and by the time we are ready for it, technology will be so incredible that this experience of becoming your heroic self will be far more profound than anything we experienced at the dawn of MMOs.

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Never been so many MMO games out there and never been so many good MMO games out there in history and never so many players played MMO games.

just cause people left and right are hoping on the cash shop band wagon for fast bucks dousnt mean anything. most of those MMOs out there aint worth jack.

heck to be honest just cause the grapics are getting prettiyer dont mean they are better, to be honest there isnt even any new MMOs that truly reach out and grab me of late, most i barely have a passing intrtest in.

F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used toProper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.

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The problem is, MMO developers no longer make worlds. Instead they make games. The problem with games is that after a certain point you are done with them. To counter this devs throw in pvp as a low cost way to keep people playing, or are slow to release content to maintain interest, or just don't take the game forward much at all. I find now, and GW2 is a good example, that if pvp isn't your thing then the game comes to a natural end at some point.

If I think back to games like UO, EQ and SWG the entertainment was something you had to find for yourself by just going out into the virtual world and getting involved in something. In my old days of EQ the "story" of my character was not something the devs designed for me, but my own collection of experiences, funny things, silly things etc. that I look back on as my own adventure. No one really told me where to go, I just stumbled in to places, people and things that held my interest. This kept me playing EQ for 5 years. It's hard to imagine spending even half that long in today's MMOs.

It's hard to know exactly why this has changed, most likely because of the initial cost of front loading a game with a detailed world when the market is now pretty saturated and success is uncertain. I think also the highly competitive nature of the MMO market, particularly with companies chasing some of WoW's revenue, has made devs afraid to make the game experience too difficult, or with too steep a learning curve, for fear of people logging off and not coming back. Now we have accelerated levelling, accelerated gear progression and content that takes days, rather than weeks to master. All this leads to a game that burns out a lot faster for the regular player.

I wouldn't call this the death throes of the MMO genre, it is evolution, but not in my view evolution in a good way. I would really like to see MMOs getting back to basics and really setting out to keep their playerbase by delivering a long term, rewarding and satisfying experience.

Never been so many MMO games out there and never been so many good MMO games out there in history and never so many players played MMO games.

just cause people left and right are hoping on the cash shop band wagon for fast bucks dousnt mean anything. most of those MMOs out there aint worth jack.

heck to be honest just cause the grapics are getting prettiyer dont mean they are better, to be honest there isnt even any new MMOs that truly reach out and grab me of late, most i barely have a passing intrtest in.

Wow, Swtor, Gw2, ... later TESO, Wildstar, TSW, ... will keep me busy for long long time. Once there was only Wow.

Never been so many MMO games out there and never been so many good MMO games out there in history and never so many players played MMO games.

just cause people left and right are hoping on the cash shop band wagon for fast bucks dousnt mean anything. most of those MMOs out there aint worth jack.

heck to be honest just cause the grapics are getting prettiyer dont mean they are better, to be honest there isnt even any new MMOs that truly reach out and grab me of late, most i barely have a passing intrtest in.

Wow, Swtor, Gw2, ... later TESO, Wildstar, TSW, ... will keep me busy for long long time. Once there was only Wow.

There was never only WoW. WoW was, and still is, one of the worst of the bunch. and TSW and SWTOR aren't even really MMOs. TESO is shaping up to be garbage just like all the other AAA MMORPGs.

There have never been so many MMOs...making so little money.

We used to have 5 VASTLY different AAA MMORPGs all enjoying great success and steady growth. Now we have one aged titan who has never implemented anything unique in its entire lifespan, and a bunch of dead and dying clones.

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Originally posted by Vonatar

The problem is, MMO developers no longer make worlds. Instead they make games. The problem with games is that after a certain point you are done with them. To counter this devs throw in pvp as a low cost way to keep people playing, or are slow to release content to maintain interest, or just don't take the game forward much at all. I find now, and GW2 is a good example, that if pvp isn't your thing then the game comes to a natural end at some point.

What problem?

It is a good thing ... I play games, not worlds. And of course all games end .. any entertainment will be boring after a while. It is just natrual.

I haven't seen a game with a true community where the primary focus was the world and human interaction and the gameplay came second in MMO in a number of years. Now the gameplay is frist and if it isn't too much trouble maybe you'll be interacting with someone too, and if no ones interacts, join an artificial bubble called a guild and interact in the bubble.

Most people don't need MMO to interact online, there are plenty of chat opportunities, facebook, twitter, disqus, liveFire, forums, email, messengers, smartphones, youtube. You have all these ways to interact with people you want, there is way too much noise to make a world where people will be truly immersed and willing to spend time with each other in a game outside of gameplay.

There's no need for it anymore, there are thousands of other and arguably better ways to interact online.

I think the term MMO lives on even though the games are now becomes multiplayer action games, but the idea behind MMO is long gone I think, it's replaced by other communities online that are far easier and more effective way to interact.

Wait, and that is a problem? If I just wanted "community" I could sit in a chat room.

That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!

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It's not mmos that are dying, just mmos as they are now. The time of themeparks and WoW clones has come to an end.

The time of the sandbox is coming!

You say that, but then we have games like TESO that is a through and through clone, heavily instanced and phased.

Even if sandbox elements start getting tossed in, we will never escape from super easy mode AAA MMOs. The hand holding and lack of risk vs reward is never going to go away.

The SWTOR disaster changed everything. SWTOR was the ultimate AAA themepark MMO, the most expensive ever made, and EAs stock price went into freefall for a year because it was such a flop. People who owned stock in EA watched half of their money vanish and the CEO who oversaw its introduction was fired last week.

Before SWTOR to even talk about sandbox put you in the fringe, now it and player generated content is the rage that everyone is talking about. My feeling is that the big companies are thinking that the MMO is past its prime, the future is mobile. As one senior member of EA recently said, swtor was a good game that would have been huge if they had made it three years earlier. And while there is certainly still a market for MMOs, it is too risky to dump an insane amount of cash into the way they did with swtor, at least I think that is what they are thinking.

And therein lies the problem, themepark MMOs are too expensive to make and maintain. Players blow through the content and developers have to put into massive amounts of effort just to keep up. The big companies are looking for ways of still tapping into the market, with less effort . . . and that is an obvious reason why the idea of player generated content is becoming so attractive. Just think, an endless supply of new content without the developers needing to do much of anything.